Stewart Lee Ruined My Life

Summary

Based on actual events. Semi-retired after over 30 years working in comics, TV and animation this writer joins a website for TV and Film jobs and falls foul of a Polish scammer who claims he’s working for three top comedians. One of them is Stewart Lee. An email to Lee establishes he’s never heard of him. This single communication with Lee will lead to tragic circumstances...

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Stewart Lee Ruined My Life - Mike Knowles

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Introduction

It all started with Major Pole.

Back in 2005 I joined an online site for film and TV jobs. I’d been a published writer for over 30 years, working mainly in comics with occasional forays into TV, radio, magazines and animation. I’d also been a gag writer. But now I’d semi-retired there was no pressure to meet deadlines. So I was surfing the Web seeing what was available. For some reason the site I joined was called Mandy for Jobs. Which sounded suspiciously like an escort agency.

Dear Mandy. I’m emailing you because I need a blowjob.

Alas, there was no Mandy. The only woman I did hook onto was a former creative director at Sachi & Sachi who ran a small indy film company called One-Eyed Dog Films and she was interested in an idea of mine involving a guy who had a talking tapeworm coming out of his arse. If I ever find that one eyed dog I’ll poke the other fucker out. But that’s sour grapes involving a painfully torturous tale that ended in a doomed attempt to get John Hurt to play the part of the Tapeworm. Forgive me but I just don’t want to go down that route. Because that route will just lead to madness. However, on this particular occasion I came across an ad from a guy who claimed he was an award winning Polish comedy film director. He gave his name as Major Pole. Major Pole, get it? And he was looking for comedy writers for a magazine he intended to publish.

What intrigued me was the claim that he was working with three top comedians. Stewart Lee, Paul Merton and an unnamed one. I immediately wondered who this unnamed comedian might be. Was he bigger than Lee and Merton? I doubted this because I was pretty confident that the media would have mentioned that one of the UK’s top comedians preferred to remain anonymous. Usually popular entertainers choose to be anonymous only if they’d been caught having a bit on the side by the tabloids. So perhaps this worked in reverse. We’d only know this person’s name if they had been caught flagrant delicto by some journalist.

Which would be very funny. But I decided that whilst Monty Python might have come up with this scenario it was hardly likely to happen in reality. Which is a shame, really.

The other thing that puzzled me was that Major Pole wasn’t offering his writers any money. Perhaps all his money was going to pay Lee, Merton and the Mystery Comedian. And there was none left for us proles. But I couldn’t imagine their agents allowing these household name (apart from one) comedians to work just for the basic minimum wage. Not unless you put a pistol to their heads Don Corleone style.

Major Pole: Either your signature or your brains go on this contract. Even rampant left-wingers like Russell Brand would consider wages like that an insult.

You’ve probably guessed I’d smelt a rat. So I emailed Stewart Lee and asked him if he knew Major Pole. Stewart replied he didn’t. So I decided to string Major Pole along and pretend to be interested. Being a wind up merchant I asked him a lot of awkward questions. Like who was this mystery comedian? Major Pole told me all would be revealed in good time. I told him he was spinning me a load of bollocks. I asked what award he’d won in Poland. It was only a small one, not worth mentioning. I said, let me guess: it was the Bullshit Award, right? And why isn’t he making any films here?

Eventually he confessed that he was working as a plumber. I told him to stick to his day job because there was more money it. If Lee, Merton and the Mystery Comedian could charge £500 just to change a tap washer they’d give comedy up on the spot and take a City & Guilds in plumbing! At this point I terminated the relationship. I did however run into him a few years later when he sent me a friend request on Facebook. It turned